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Finding an Editorial Calendar

After a meeting of the Iowa Tech Chicks last week, I determined that I really had to find an editorial calendar tool for my blog(s). (I’m still trying to decide exactly what I’m going to manage and how.)

I considered Excel, and I did some test runs with a few WordPress plugins, but didn’t love either. Then, today I stumbled on CoSchedule. Maybe it’s post-Valentine’s emotional overflow, but I think I’m in love. This calendar has everything my geeky heart wants for organization and the installation and connection to social media accounts was seamless.

How do I love CoSchedule? Let me tell you the ways

It’s lightweight – CoSchedule works with WordPress natively, but it doesn’t live within WordPress, which means it doesn’t slow down your blog in any way. It’s cloud-based, but you can choose to manage posts within your WordPress install or in the app, it’s up to you.

The set-up, as noted above. I’ve installed plenty of apps in my time that try to connect with my social media accounts – hands down, CoSchedule rocked it.

Creating planned posts is intuitive. You can sketch out your post and plan your social media promotion for it at the same time. This means you don’t forget or get too busy to check in if, by some miracle you get so organized that your posts are pre-written and scheduled. Smart!

If you love to check off items on a to-do list there’s also a task scheduler. You know, so you can guilt yourself about planning your monthly calendar, writing this week’s posts, checking your analytics (you can integrate Google Analytics and Bit.ly, by the way).

Color coding – another element that makes me happy. I don’t know that color-coding is a geeky trait, but anytime I can organize myself using color for easy reference I smile to myself.

It’s extendable – I don’t know that I will ever get to the point that I use it this way, but you can have multiple authors/contributors and multiple blogs and social media channels all tied into one account.

I’m just getting started using it, so chances are I’m going to find even more to love. It’s not free, but it’s also really affordable – $10/month per blog. For what it does that’s a pretty great price as far as I’m concerned.

And they have a testimonial from Jay Baer, that seals the value, right? (If you don’t know, he’s super cool – I’ve heard him speak a few times now and always come away inspired.)